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Campaign 2000: The Silence Of The
Candidates Is What I Want To Talk About
By Howard Zinn, The Progressive 8 March 2000
Every day, as the soggy rhetoric of the Presidential candidates
accumulates into an enormous pile of solid waste, we get more and more evidence of the
failure of the American
political system. The candidates for the job of leader of the most
powerful country in the
world have nothing important to say. On domestic issues, they offer
platitudes about health
care and Social Security and taxes, which are meaningless given the
record of both political
parties. And on foreign policy, utter silence.
That silence is what I want to talk about.
In domestic policy, there are enough slight differences among the
candidates to make some
liberals and progressives--desperate for hopeful signs--seize upon the
most feeble of
promises. Al Gore and Bill Bradley take wobbly steps toward covering
some fraction of the
forty-four million uninsured, but no candidate proposes universal,
nonprofit,
government-guaranteed health care. John McCain and George W. Bush
mutter unintelligibly
about one or another tax plan, but no Republican or Democrat talks
about taxing the wealth
and income of the super-rich in such a way as to make several trillion
dollars available for
housing, health, jobs, education.
But on foreign and military policy, there are not even mutterings about
change. All the
candidates vie with one another in presenting themselves as supporters
of the Pentagon,
desirous of building up our military strength. Here is Mr.
Universe--bulging ridiculously with
muscles useless for anything except winning contests and bullying the
other kids on the
block (it is important to be #1, important to maintain
"credibility")--promising to buy more
body-building equipment, and asking all of us to pay for it.
How can we, if we have any self-respect, support
candidates--Repub-lican or Democrat--who
have nothing to say about the fact that the United States, with 4
percent of the world's
population, consumes 25 percent of its wealth? How can we support them
when they have
nothing to say about our obligation to the other 96 percent, many of
whom are suffering as a
result of American policy?
What is our obligation?
First, to follow the Hippocratic Oath and "Do No Harm." Instead, we are
doing much harm.
By depriving the people of Iraq of food, medicine, and vital equipment,
we are causing them
enormous suffering under the pretense of "sending a message" to Saddam
Hussein. It
appears we have no other way to send a message but through killing
people. How does this
differ, except in scale, from the killings done by terrorists around
the world, who also defend
their acts by claiming their need to "send a message"?
We pretend we care about "democracy" in Cuba--we who have supported
dictatorships all
over Latin America for 100 years and in Cuba itself until Fidel Castro
came to power. Truth
is, we cannot bear the thought that Castro for forty years has defied
us, refusing to pay us
the homage to which we are accustomed in this hemisphere. Castro has
spurned the
invitation to become a member of the world capitalist club, and that
is, evidently,
unforgivable. And so we impose an embargo on Cuba and make its people
suffer.
Which candidate, Democrat or Republican, has had the decency to speak
out on this
embargo, and on the deprivation it has caused for the children of Cuba?
What meaning has
the phrase "human rights" if people are denied the necessities of life?
Which candidate, Democrat or Republican, has said a word about our
obscene possession
of thousands of nuclear weapons--while Washing-ton goes into hysterics
over the possibility
that some country in the Middle East may some day have one nuclear
bomb? None of them
has the courage to say what common sense tells us, and what someone so
expert on
military issues and so tied to the Establishment as Paul Nitze (a
former arms control
adviser in the Reagan Administration) has publicly said: "I see no
compelling reason why
we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons. . . . It is
the presence of nuclear
weapons that threatens our existence."
While the front pages report the latest solemn pronouncements of the
candidates,
professing their concern for the well-being of Americans, the inside
pages report the brutal
Russian assault on Chechnya, with barely a word from these candidates
about the
well-being of men, women, and children who were huddled in the
basements of Grozny,
awaiting the next wave of bombings.
There have been a few lame expressions of protest from the Clinton
Administration, but it is
careful not to offend the Russian leaders, and so, last October, the
Toronto Sun reported:
"In Moscow, standing next to her beaming Russian hosts, U.S. Secretary
of State
Madeleine Albright proclaimed, 'We are opposed to terrorism' meaning
Islamic rebels in the
Caucasus fighting Russian rule.' We can't forget that Clinton supported
the Russian war on
Chechnya from 1994 to 1996, going so far (he does get carried away) as
to compare
Chechnya to the Confederacy of the Civil War, which had to be put down
for the sake of the
larger nation. Yeltsin as Lincoln--that was a bit of a stretch.
Is it possible that the various candidates--all supported by huge
corporate wealth (it is
expected that $3 billion will be spent on the elections)--do not dare
challenge a foreign
policy whose chief motivation is not human rights but business profit?
Behind the coldness to the people of Chechnya and Iraq, there is the
crass matter of oil in
that part of the world. Last November, Stephen Kinzer of The New York
Times reported from
Istanbul: "Four nations in the Caspian Sea region took a giant step
today toward embracing
one of President Clinton's cherished foreign policy projects, a
pipeline that would assure
Western control over the potentially vast oil and natural gas reserves
. . . and give the
United States greater influence in the region." The word "cherished"
suggests an emotional
attachment one cannot find with regard to human rights in the Third
World. Does Clinton
equally "cherish" projects designed to eliminate hunger and illness? Do
the Presidential
candidates?
The World Health Organization has described the plight of ten million
people--dying of AIDS
or tuberculosis--as "a silent genocide." The numbers make it as serious
and frightening as
Hitler's genocide, which our political leaders regularly deplore, at no
cost to themselves. But
no candidate proposes that we stop spending several hundred billions on
the military, stop
selling arms to countries all over the world, stop the use of land
mines, stop training the
officers of military dictatorships in the Third World--and use that
money to wipe out
tuberculosis and stem the spread of AIDS.
Gore, speaking to the U.N. Security Council a few weeks ago, promised
to increase the
U.S. commitment to fight AIDS up to $325 million. This is a tinier
commitment than that of
other industrialized countries and less than the money spent for one
fighter-bomber. And
that sum pales in comparison to the $1.6 billion proposed by the
Clinton Administration for
Colombia, ostensibly to fight the war on drugs but really to deal with
rebellion.
I suppose the problem is that people who are being bombed around the
world, or people
who are dying as the result of preventable illnesses, do not vote in
American elections. Our
political system is not sensitive to the needs even of some of our own
citizens who don't
vote--the homeless, the imprisoned, the very poor--so how can we expect
it to care a whit
about people 5,000 miles from our voting booths, however miserable
their situation?
Since our political system--bipartisan in its coldness to human
rights--imposes a silence on
these issues, it cannot be respected. It can only be protested against,
challenged, or, in the
words of the Declaration of Independence, referring to a government
that has violated its
responsibility to its people, "altered or abolished." That's a tall
order, but it can be prepared
for by a multitude of short steps, in which citizens act, outside of
the party system, to
redress their grievances.
Howard Zinn, author of "A People's History of the United States," is a
columnist for The
Progressive.
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